Sciota bar owner desperate for buyer

The Twin Willows Bar and Restaurant in Sciota has been for sale for two years but hasn't had many serious offers to buy it.

MICHAEL SADOWSKI

The Twin Willows Bar and Restaurant in Sciota has been for sale for two years but hasn't had many serious offers to buy it.

So, owner Sable Michado said she had to get creative to try and sell it. First it was listed on Craigslist, then a realty service and then she came up with a new idea — offering $50,000 to anyone who can find a buyer.

After she came up with the idea, told friends and hung fliers around the bar offering the reward that would be paid at the property's closing, she was dealt bad news.

She wasn't allowed to do it, per a realty agreement.

"I thought, 'In today's day and age, who couldn't use that chunk of change?'" said Michado, 52, of East Stroudsburg. "But it doesn't look like we can do it, unfortunately."

Too bad, because bartender Valerie Donnelly said she fields questions about it all the time.

"People are always asking about it," she said. "They're curious."

The bar, opened in 1927, remains up for sale, according to Michado. She is trying to sell it to someone who can revive it "the way it deserves," she said. The list price is $450,000 — down from an appraisal near $700,000 — and she hopes that she can get someone to buy it that can commit to running it full time.

Currently, the bar is open only from about noon to 8 p.m. and doesn't have a full menu because Michado doesn't like "the drama of the evening." However, she said the liquor license allows for the bar to be open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. each day.

Michado is going through family issues that force her to split her time between the Poconos and New Jersey, and is eyeing retirement from the bar business.

She bought the bar with two other partners in 2008 after almost 50 years of one-family ownership. In her research on the history of the building, she found it was the second one in Monroe County to be issued a liquor license, that it started as a hot dog hut in the '20s, and in the 1940s, it operated as a brothel called Margie's.